Start with what a curriculum map is for
A curriculum map records what is planned, taught and assessed across a school, so that teachers can see how their year fits into a child's whole experience and coordinators can see gaps and repetition without reading every unit planner.
Decide the purpose before the format. A map built to satisfy a visit tends to be complete and unused. A map built so teachers can plan from it tends to be used and, over time, becomes the evidence anyway.
It also helps to know what a map is not. It is not a scope and sequence, which is the shorter progression view read from it; the difference is set out in scope and sequence versus curriculum map.
Step 1: define the framework for each programme
Begin with the programmes you offer and the structures each one requires. The PYP, MYP, DP and CP are organised differently, and forcing them into one planning template loses the things each is built around: the programme of inquiry and transdisciplinary themes in the PYP, subject-group objectives, criteria and global contexts in the MYP, the subject guides and core in the DP.
Where the IB publishes the structure, use it exactly and treat the IB's current programme documentation as the authority. Where it leaves a choice to the school, write the choice down.
Step 2: map the years and the learning
Create the year-level structure first, then add subjects, transdisciplinary units or programme-specific courses inside it. For each cell, capture the essentials and stop: the unit title, the concepts it develops, the skills, and roughly when it runs.
Add progression as you go. A teacher reading a unit should be able to see what students met before and what comes next, without leaving the page.
Step 3: connect objectives and assessment
This is the step that turns a list of topics into a working curriculum. Link each unit to the objectives, criteria or standards it develops, and to the assessments that will show whether it did. In the MYP that means the subject-group criteria; in the DP, the assessment objectives and internal assessment; in the PYP, the learning goals and the way understanding is evidenced.
Be selective. Twelve links per unit is a document nobody trusts. Three well-chosen ones are useful and checkable.
Step 4: review coverage before you publish it
Read the map for what it says about the school. Look for concepts carried by four units in a row, objectives nothing assesses, years where a strand disappears, and units that exist only in one teacher's head. These are visible in a map and invisible in a folder of planners.
Do this review with the people who teach it, and fix what you find before the map becomes a reference, not after.
Where skodle fits
This section names our own product, so weigh it accordingly. Every step above works in a spreadsheet, and many schools begin there.
In skodle the map, its units and its lessons are records: a unit sits in a grade and subject of a programme, and a lesson sits in a unit. A map is versioned by cloning and activating a new version, with the old one archived. For PYP and MYP units there is a gap report, so step 4 is a report rather than an afternoon with a highlighter: overused and unused concepts, objectives that are unmapped or unassessed, and units missing evidence or assessment, computed from the standards your school enters and the mappings a person approves. See curriculum planning and the IB Engine.
The limits. The report counts what people link; it cannot tell you whether a mapping is sound, and an unmapped unit looks like a gap. It covers PYP and MYP units, not DP, CP, Cambridge or CBSE, and it has no year-by-year view. Lesson records are light: a title, objectives and a planned flag, not links to standards or resources. It does not carry the official IB route for registration and coursework submission. And a Cambridge or CBSE school uses the school structure and framework-tagged unit planning rather than curriculum maps built to those syllabuses.
Step 5: keep it alive
Set the review rhythm before launch: who may change a unit, who approves a change to objectives, and when the whole map is read together. Keep a version history, so a change is a recorded decision rather than an overwrite, and so that last year's map can still be shown to a visiting team.
The maps that survive are the ones teachers plan in, not the ones they are asked to copy into afterwards.
Common mistakes
Mapping everything at once instead of one subject or one programme first. Copying the IB's published text into every cell. Letting each department invent its own columns. Treating the map as finished at launch. And building it in a tool teachers do not open in the ordinary run of the week.
If you want a starting structure to copy, the fields programme by programme are in an IB curriculum map template.
